Why Are There So Many Great Argentine Dancers?

Buenos Aires is a curious city. It gets under your skin, with its mix of grandeur and grubbiness, its French-style apartment buildings and majestic trees looming somewhat wearily over perennially torn-up sidewalks. Fancy dogs, promenaded by harried dog-walkers, rub shoulders with extreme poverty and constant, low-grade protests. (We Argentines are champion complainers.) The city is suffused with a powerful sense of its former importance—Argentina was once one of wealthiest countries in the world—even as it recedes resentfully into the distant past. One of the most common questions a visitor is asked is, “What do people say about us in New York/London/wherever”? To which one must almost apologetically reply, not very much at all.

It is also a place that has produced, and still produces—despite hard times, relative isolation, and constant political upheaval—people of great talent and accomplishment, in just about every field. Around the world, there are prominent Argentine doctors, scientists, international-law experts, conductors, musicians. This is especially striking in the world of dance. Ballet was more or less a twentieth-century import to Argentina, brought by travelling troupes like Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, but its roots have dug their way down deep. At one time, the country could attract the best dancers and choreographers to work at its elegant and vast Teatro Colón, a seigneurial pile that fills an entire city block off of the Avenida 9 de Julio. George Balanchine and Bronislava Nijinska both worked there; Anna Pavlova and Rudolf Nureyev danced there. European teachers flocked there in the early twentieth century, fleeing revolutions and war.

Those teachers trained the next generation of teachers, and so on to this day. Argentina still produces a disproportionate number of topnotch dancers, who make their way into the world’s great ballet companies. Over the years, these have included Julio Bocca, Maximiliano Guerra, Paloma Herrera, Ludmila Pagliero, Herman Cornejo, and Marianela Núñez. And these are just the stars. But Argentina’s pride is also Argentina’s loss. As the extraordinary virtuoso Cornejo recently told me during a brief trip home to Buenos Aires, “All the artists we admired trained here and then left the country. In your mind it was: school is here, but for a career you need to leave.”

Cornejo, who was in town for a ballet gala at the Teatro Colón, recalled how he got hooked on ballet as a young kid. He doesn’t come from a family of dancers or musicians. His father was in the military. When he was five or six, his mother gave him a video of the Soviet virtuoso Vladimir Vasiliev, a huge star, dancing “Spartacus.” He was so impressed by that video that she bought him a ticket to see the ballet—a testosterone-driven tale about a Roman slave rebellion—live at the Luna Park arena downtown, danced by one of the big Argentine stars of the eighties, Maximiliano Guerra. (His career was mostly in Europe, but he came back for occasional tours.) After that, Cornejo decided that he, too, wanted to be a dancer. He studied at the Colón’s feeder school, the Instituto Superior de Arte, as well as privately, won some big international prizes, and then left Argentina definitively to join American Ballet Theatre. He’s now in his mid-thirties, and one of the world’s finest male dancers, but hadn’t been invited to dance at the Colón until recently. “We’ve had a great career in many people’s eyes,” he told a local reporter, “but it took some effort to get back to Argentina.” He’ll be dancing at the Colón again in November, this time in a three-act ballet, “La Bayadère,” with another Argentine dancer, Ludmila Pagliero. Pagliero is an étoile (the top rank) at the Paris Opera Ballet.

One of his classmates from ballet school, Marianela Núñez, also danced at the gala. She, too, left Argentina at a young age (fourteen). At sixteen, she joined the Royal Ballet, in London, where she is now a principal dancer. Like Cornejo, she has impeccable technique, sensitive musicality, and a kind of luminous modesty onstage. She doesn’t grab your attention by force as some ballerinas do; instead, she draws you in quietly, by the very naturalness with which she does things. Then—pow!—she’ll just fly into the air. Her transitions, especially, are seamless. It’s stealth technique, not fireworks. A few days after the gala, she performed the role of Tatiana in “Onegin,” a ballet based on Pushkin’s novel in verse about a bored dandy who falls desperately in love with a girl he once humiliated. It was her first full-length ballet with the company.

It was a radiant, fine-spun performance. During the curtain calls, Núñez peered up at the top ring of the enormous house with tear-rimmed eyes. “A ton of moments from my childhood flashed by in that moment,” she told me the next day at the elegant Petit Colón café next door, after rushing in from a rehearsal. (Her mother used to wait for her there after ballet class.) Her parents had been at the performance. Her father was overcome. “He just stood there, in a corner, waiting quietly while people came to congratulate me. And then, pam!, he just started to cry.”

What was it like to dance with her old classmates from ballet school, many of whom are still in the company? “Everyone kept saying, ‘It’s like you never left,’ ” she told me. The man who brought her back is the recently named director of the company: Maximiliano Guerra, come full circle. In a weird way, Cornejo, Núñez, Pagliero, and Guerra are all bound together, like family. And why are there so many great Argentine dancers, I asked? “Well, first of all we have a great base. There are great teachers here. But, you know, nothing is served to us on a platter. We’ve all had to scramble for things, from a very young age. It’s something we have inside of us, and when we go abroad, people notice.”

The ovation after “Onegin” went on for a long time. After a few minutes, I began to look around. To my left, standing in the aisle, I saw a young dancer in the company, Macarena Giménez. I’d seen her rehearse a different ballet last year—yet another promising Argentine dancer with beautiful technique and seemingly limitless potential. As she stood there, barely clapping, as if in a trance, I could see her cheek was bathed with tears. She will dance the second female role in “La Bayadère,” Gamzatti, with Cornejo this November. Then, who knows?